SWIM IN THE SPRINGS

The South Waikato Dis­trict Coun­cil’s In Touch news­let­ter stated their ‘‘pri­mary fo­cus

is to dis­cour­age swim­ming’’ at the Blue Spring of Te Wai­hou walk­way. Can some­one

please ex­plain why?

I host many over­seas vis­i­tors whom I reg­u­larly take there, and a few are even tempted

to jump in. Swim­ming in such pris­tine wa­ter is ex­actly the New Zealand I want them to see and re­mem­ber. Due to the con­stant 11 de­grees tem­per­a­ture, no-one stays in the wa­ter for very long.

I un­der­stand the town’s wa­ter sup­ply is taken from down in the spring, well un­der the sur­face and well be­low any risk of any con­tam­i­na­tion.

Now that (won­der­fully) a toi­let is on site, I can­not imag­ine many peo­ple would defe­cate in the wa­ter at a rate that would be a pol­lu­tant.

SWDC ad­vised they were in­creas­ing the bud­get by $10,000 to

‘‘con­trib­ute’’ to­wards the cost of a co-man­age­ment agree­ment with Ruakawa. $10,000 plus seems an in­or­di­nate amount of money to spend on pa­per­work.

I pre­sume there is al­ready an ex­ist­ing man­age­ment plan in place with the ex­ist­ing stake­hold­ers in Te Wai­hou – the pri­vate own­ers who orig­i­nally do­nated land and the schools and vol­un­teers who have built the